A Profitable Pen

When the British Houses of Parliament honoured Winston Churchill on his 80th birthday in 1954, he told the lords and members of Parliament that “if I found the right words, you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue.” In Mr. Churchill’s Profession: The Statesman as Author and the Book That Defined the “Special Relationship,” Peter Clarke, a distinguished historian of modern Britain, proves beyond doubt that Churchill teetered on the edge of bankruptcy for most of his life and only found prosperity in old age because of his fluent pen and remarkable tongue. His late financial success came from the commercial triumph of his history of “the English-speaking peoples,” a concept that he discovered only late in life and a work that was far from what was promised to publishers and, according to his sympathetic biographer Roy Jenkins’s analysis, by no stretch of the imagination the best of Churchill’s books.

Celebratory mists...